Storing unicodes in Dynalist

Stephen_Dewitt · July 6, 2017, 3:37pm

Just a quick idea:

To store unicodes in dynalist and get a drop down menu, just create a series of tags which include the ones you want with a fixed prefix which you only use for this purpose e.g.:

@*
@*
@*

etc etc (@* will bring a drop down menu of these three which you can choose from)

The slight downside with this approach is you need to delete the @* star sign if you want the unicode by itself, and of course with a macro program like phrase express you can store them more directly, however this has the advantage of making them available on mobile and if you regularly operate on other computers which don’t have a macro program etc

Enjoy!

Stephen

Stephen_Dewitt · July 6, 2017, 5:07pm

I think these can also be a more visually appealing /easier to visually search method of assigning gtd context tags e.g. #/* (home) #/* (online) etc …

Vincent_Tang · July 6, 2017, 6:54pm

i like this idea

I can only remember a handful of phrase express unicode macros I have

Vincent_Tang · July 7, 2017, 6:04pm

i just remembered a really useful unicode symbol

∴

its short in the science community as “thusly” or “therefore”

do you have list of unicode symbols you use

Stephen_Dewitt · July 7, 2017, 7:25pm

It’s in progress, at the moment I’m working with these:

GTD
#* (think / brainstorm etc)
#* (Calendar based planning)
#* (call)
#* (message - any type, including reply)
#* (needs laptop e.g. proper work)
#* (research)
#* (read)
#* (write)
#+✋ (for physical things)
#+🏡 (at home)
#+👣 (errand)
#+🚗 (errand requiring car)
Other
#_� (a question)
#_🚩 (waiting)
#_🙍 (Partner (event))
#_⌚ (event)

Stephen_Dewitt · July 9, 2017, 1:19pm

New mini development:

‘Computer work’ has become it’s own category (generally I prefer to have no more than four of these for each ‘punctuation’ as that is all the dynalist drop down menu will allow without pressing the ‘show all’ menu, which slows things down) with four sub categories based on difficulty:

.#- (The hardest work requiring a lot of brain power / 100% focus)
.#- (Medium difficulty (Not ‘oh god’ that horrible piece of work, but still challenging)
.#-(Very easy / unchallenging work but not quite mindless (I wouldn’t be able to process a radio show at the same time)
.#-(Literally mindless work like data entry I can do while listening to e.g. a radio show)

I find this extremely helpful for my working day as I tend to plan my day to alternate between levels of difficulty to keep myself from going insane.

Erica · July 10, 2017, 12:22am

Sounds like a nice productivity trick!

Leonardo_Muzkiz_Ramo · July 26, 2017, 3:41am

Ive created a whole unicode tag list for every symbol too. for example I just write #car and the tag gets completed #car emoji for car appears attached and later I erase the #car text.

DimitryJacobs · July 26, 2017, 5:03am

Leonardo,

Can you explain how you implement this … and can you share with other users ??

Vincent_Tang · July 26, 2017, 1:15pm

I personally just use the condensed wikipedia list of common unicodes

You can just copy + paste these

https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Unicode/List_of_useful_symbols

Here’s anohter list i found, most common 2000 unicode chars

gist.github.com

https://gist.github.com/ivandrofly/0fe20773bd712b303f78

Unicode table


Unicode table - List of most common Unicode characters *
* This summary list contains about 2000 characters for most common ocidental/latin languages and most printable symbols but not chinese, japanese, arab, archaic and some unprintable.
Contains character codes in HEX (hexadecimal), decimal number, name/description and corresponding printable symbol.
What is Unicode?

Unicode is a standard created to define letters of all languages and characters such as punctuation and technical symbols. Today, UNICODE (UTF-8) is the most used character set encoding (used by almost 70% of websites, in 2013). The second most used character set is ISO-8859-1 (about 20% of websites), but this old encoding format is being replaced by Unicode.
How to identify the Unicode number for a character?

Type or paste a character:

This file has been truncated. show original

Leonardo_Muzkiz_Ramo · July 26, 2017, 5:55pm

this is the list. later you can add emojis to all your documents simply writing the object in tag.
I have it in spanish but you can copy it if you like
you could do your own version with english tags
https://dynalist.io/d/en8JRAp8CReowdVdpfl3DWzw

Vincent_Tang · September 1, 2017, 4:21pm

still primarily use these

→
←
↑
↓

not really using much of these atm, partially because I keep forgetting about them

✪
★

I started using these unicode symbols a lot

✓
✗

The ✓ and X are really useful and I use these in place of checkboxes all the time. I binded ✓ to “k#” and ✗ to “x#” which is very easy to remember and type using phraseexpress.

I use this all the time whenever I do a quiz / have multiple options to do something and need to highlight which option is the one I chose / correct

Example:

Its very useful for taking down notes if you do sysadmin stuff since there’s generally a plethora of options when trying to setup a server for instance

Example:

also I can search all the options I chose whenever I did a task and just look at ✓ in search area or chrome’s ctrl+F search

I use ✓ and ✗ in place of checkboxes since I can type it faster and it doesn’t disrupt my writing flow

Vincent_Tang · September 16, 2017, 4:45pm

I’m starting to treat my dynalsit docs like I do with graphic design / adobe indesign

I find this unicode library to be interesting to me

Specifically, these:

◆ ►◆ ★ ◗▬▸▮

I think I am moving away from this ✪ , too distracting (too many colors)

I’m moving towards merging more bulletpoints of information together, and using those symbols in place of periods. So I can read through a snippet of text easier.

I had to do some hiring for work and sometimes I talk to interesting candidates, alot of times I’ll learn a lot of weird interesting things and workflows (sometimes, I incorporate those ideas into my own), so I took some notes on things I learned about HVAC, this is how i formatted those notes using unicode symbols like ▲. side note: I normally use these hiring session timeframes / notes to conduct surveys as well about the local economy, what companies do in the area, surveys on which hiring service like indeed works best, etc. So I have a system set up ahead of time on where I will put these notes in dynalist

Normally I would write and tag these notes in evernote… but I haven’t touched evernote in like several months. I’m still not sure what formatting unicodes I like best yet to use in dynalist, I am super picky about how my document looks overall. I try to make it highly readable as possible, while still retaining a lot of information

123 · March 29, 2018, 7:24am

are these ‘symbols’ only used by way of copy/paste?

visual symbols can sometimes be good for communication

use some to change some sites

overall for taking down info, they do not seem very beneficial or necessary

the color usage in that last pic is likely the most important kind of usage for ‘visuals’

Stephen_Dewitt · March 29, 2018, 1:57pm

There are lots of programs which provide text replacement (e.g. you type hm and the unicode appears) - I have a blackberry phone which has this baked in - on chrome there’s textblaze and for desktop phrase express